Photos: Mosaic Glass Dishes and Bronze Jugs from Roman England A man with a metal detector happened upon a Roman-era grave while he was canvassing a field in a U.K. village located between London and Cambridge. The man got in touch with local archaeologists, and together they uncovered the grave's contents, including glass mosaic plates, bronze jugs and nails from Roman shoes, likely buried to help the man travel in the afterlife.

The Archaeology News Network: Newly-discovered remains redraw path of Great Wall Archaeologists have discovered ruins of the Great Wall along the border of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province, dispelling a common belief that there were no sections of the wall in this area. Among the ruins, six sections, constructed with stones or loess, stretch about 10 km between Nanchangtan Village of Ningxia and Jingyuan County of Gansu on the southern bank of the Yellow River. Because of flooding and natural degradation, the height of these sections of the Great Wall has been reduced to one to five meters.

The USS Independence aircraft carrier, which operated during World War II, has been located about a half mile underwater off California's Farallon Islands.

Using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) dubbed the Echo Ranger and a 3D-imaging sonar system, researchers have created a detailed picture of the 622-foot-long (190 m) ship, revealing that it is "amazingly intact," said scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The 3D images also showed what appears to be a plane in the carrier's hangar, the researchers noted.

A long-past hunting party left a permanent sign of its outing — and it was not empty beer cans. Dozens of 1.5-million-year-old human footprints in Kenya may be evidence of an early antelope hunt, offering a rare look at the lives of ancient humans, researchers reported at a conference in California this week.
Footprints are the rarest of human relics. They tend to erode away very quickly; only the choicest of conditions keep them preserved for thousands or millions of years. But unlike collections of bones and tools — which are difficult to link to a single individual or group — footprints offer a snapshot of daily life.

A set of four salt-glazed bottles, adorned with stylised face masks of bearded men who seem to be showing varying levels of malevolence, could have been used as protective charms or as antidotes to witchcraft, according to new speculation surrounding the excavation of two Hampshire cottages in 1981.

Anne Leaver, who lived opposite the construction site for a British Telecom exchange building in Abbotts Ann, led members of the Andover Archaeological Society to the suspected former homes, where mechanical removal of surface layers revealed brick flooring and footings, a flint-lined wall and a bottle in an upright position beneath a hearth.

A second, inverted bottle was found under a hearth. Two more – one inverted, one upright – surfaced nearby, each containing a cork bung and reflecting designs from the early 16th century Rhineland, commonly found in England from the 17th century.

The mummy was found Tuesday morning in a fetal position, tied with a rope, in a cardboard box near trash outside an archeological site in the Pre-Incancity of Chan Chan.

"[The cleaners] thought it was rubbish and put it in the compactor but one cleaner opened it up and discovered it was a mummy,'' said David Carrasco, municipal security at Huanchaco District, according to Reuters.

If it wasn't for the one cleaner, it's very possible the ancient discovery would have been thrown out for good.

Complex cognition shaped the Stone Age hand axe -- ScienceDaily The ability to make a Lower Paleolithic hand axe depends on complex cognitive control by the prefrontal cortex, including the 'central executive' function of working memory, a new study finds. The results knock another chip off theories that Stone Age hand axes are simple tools that don't involve higher-order executive function of the brain